At the Heart of Perestroika was Gorbachev’s Faith in ‘the Idea of the Peaceful Coexistence of Red and White Ideas,’ Tsipko Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 10 – Mikhail Gorbachev believed that “by condemning Stalin’s repressions and returning to the late Lenin, he could save both the Soviet system based on the public ownership of the means of production and the Soviet Union as a multi-national state, Aleksandr Tsipko says.

            In short, the senior Russian commentator who cooperated with Gorbachev during the latter’s presidency, the first and last Soviet president believed that there could be “a peaceful coexistence of red and white ideas” and that his promotion of that as a goal would strengthen not weaken both him and the USSR (mk.ru/politics/2026/03/10/shestidesyatnicheskaya-revolyuciya-gorbacheva-v-lichnosti-poslednego-rukovoditelya-sssr-soshlis-nesoedinimye-vzglyady.html).

            In this, Gorbachev was profoundly mistaken, Tsipko continues; but in order to understand what he did do, it is critical to focus on what he believed and tried to do rather than on what his thoughts and actions led to and what happened after he left power and the Soviet Union disintegrated.

            According to Tsipko, Gorbachev had “a faith in communism, the humanistic values of European culture, the value of human life, and the value of freedom and at the same time a faith in Russian statism and that even with all the democratic reforms he was carrying out, the USSR could be preserved.”

            But what he lacked, the Moscow commentator says, is something that sometimes “characterizes the representatives of the deep Russian people: he lacked envy for the success of others and for their outstanding abilities” and did not feel the need to tear them down to boost himself. Because of this combination, Tsipko argues, “Gorbachev miscalculated.”

            Many Russians today dislike Gorbachev because unlike Boris Yeltsin, “he was categorically opposed to the idea of the sovereignty of the RSFSR and categorically opposed to the dissolution of the USSR; and many analysts have forgotten that Yeltsin was “popular among Russians primarily because he backed” ending “the feeding of the Caucasus and Ukraine.”

            Tsipko argues that Gorbachev was deeply attached to the idea of the USSR as “a multi-national country and as a union of peoples. He was completely devoid of ethnic Russian nationalism.” Being “a mixture” of Ukrainian and Russian blood, he believed the collapse of the USSR would be “an irreparable disaster for both Russians and Ukrainians.”

            The Soviet president “truly couldn’t imagine how Russia could exist without Ukraine, and he once told Tsipko that the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991 was “just the beginning” and in no way the end of the story of the Russian state and its travails,” saying that was why he had told Yeltsin he could be president but needed to sign a new Union Treaty.